Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: Features :: Tech Giants Court The Genome Crowd
Tech Giants Court The Genome Crowd

Desperate for good news and new markets, leading technology companies look toward red-hot genomics and bioinformatics for salvation.

Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: Features :: Tech Giants Court The Genome Crowd



By Carolyn Marshall, May 29, 2001

It's close to midnight in San Francisco and J. Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics, is dancing like a madman. Black tie still tight, Venter mock surfs in rhythm to a blaring oldie by the Beach Boys. The maverick scientist, it seems, is the beau of this $85,000 ball, the first of several champagne-and-caviar events planned worldwide and hosted by Celera's gene team to honor the men and women who made DNA a household word.


Venter is both blamed and credited with triggering a bitter rivalry between the public and private teams racing to decode the Human Genome. The teams delivered final versions of the gene map in February and since then it has been non-stop for Venter and his colleagues: press conferences, seminars, television appearances and, yes, time spent with gene groupies and Nobel wannabes anxious to snag an autograph or pose with Venter for a snapshot.


But behind every larger-than-life celebrity, a phalanx of assistants exist-rarely seen but essential to maintaining the star's celebrity status. In this case, that phalanx is a $50 million supercomputing "server farm" with 600 DNA sequencing machines and 64-bit, 833 MHz AlphaServer systems made by Compaq Computer.


"Celera never would have been able to pull this off without us," crows Ty Rabe, Compaq's director of High Performance Technical Computing Solutions, in Marlboro, Mass.



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